Idiots Write About Sports

So earlier this week, I came across this excerpt from Peter Gammons’ latest column for the Worldwide Leader in Sports:

Cabrera is a dashing, 78 rpm defender who sometimes almost plays too fast. But he gives himself up when necessary, pounds high fastballs and clearly loves playing on a Red Sox team that is in contention and sold out every game all season. “Orlando is one of my favorite players of all time,” Expos GM Omar Minaya said. “He lives to win. We offered him a contract comparable to what we gave Jose Vidro [$30 million for four years], but he told me he didn’t care about the money, he wanted to go somewhere where he’d be in a pennant race.” Roberts is right about Cabrera, and the same thing can be said about Derek Jeter — who the stats Nazis will insist from their garages isn’t an exceptional shortstop — and Brian Roberts. On the other hand, there are some star-type players that are not as good on a pennant contender. (emphasis mine)

Now I suppose you can get bent out of shape over the appropriateness of comparing folks who perform statistical analysis of baseball to the adherents of National Socialism. But my only objection to casually tossing around the Nazi terminology is that it’s rhetorically lazy — right there on the Over-Used Phrases List (between “the original [blank] from Hell” and “the mother of all [blanks]”), which writers who are serious about their craft should avoid. If Peter Gammons wants to lazily fall back on the Nazi rhetorical device, that’s his problem, not mine. He’s certainly better than that, but on the other hand, one less-than-artful phrase hardly makes him the laziest man on ESPN’s payroll.
So… time passes. And as I make my way around the Web this week, I found an item or two noting Gammons’ clumsy turn-of-phrase. More significantly, however, both items pointed out that the column had since been edited to remove the “stats Nazis” verbiage. Indeed, head on over to the Gammons column linked to above, and you’ll find that “stats Nazis” is now “statheads” with no indication that it was ever any other way.
I find this development… disturbing.
On the Internet, pressing the delete key means never having to say you’re sorry — I say that a lot; maybe I’ve even said it here. And what I mean by that is, in most any other medium, once you’ve set down your words in print or on videotape, you’re on the hook for how the public receives them. It’s not that way on the Internet — write something dopey or offensive and you can always go back later and eliminate every last trace of it, like airbrushing an out-of-favor Soviet agricultural minister out of a photo. Gammons and ESPN.com aren’t the first online entity to post something, think better of it, and then pretend like it never happened, but you would think that professional standards might stop them from doing so or at least convince them to handle corrections and retractions in a less sneaky manner.
Why can’t Gammons — or his editor — append the article with a footnote? “An earlier version of this column used a regrettable turn of phrase that, upon further reflection, never should have seen the light of day. My apologies.” Slate does this, correcting the stories it posts, but noting corrections at the bottom of the page so that authors and editors still have some form of public accountability. Does ESPN.com figure its readers don’t deserve the same courtesy?
Did Gammons decide to correct his own copy? Was it done because readers objected to the casual allusion to Nazism? We’ll never know. Heck, most people won’t even know that the switch was ever made in the first place. And to me, that seems like the bigger offense.
A somewhat related sidenote that may be of interest and relevance only to me — earlier this year, in one of my other non-paying Web punditry gigs, I wrote an article about how badly a once-great television show had fallen off this season and I speculated on some of the reasons for why that might be. Well, the producer of the show read the article and hunted down little ol’ me to tell me that my speculation was way off base (“typical Internet rubbish” or something similar was the phrase he used) and that if I had any ounce of integrity, I would go back and edit my story to reflect that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I wrote him what I hope was a polite note under the circumstances and explained that while I’d be happy to run a rebuttal from him, I wasn’t going to go back and change my story as if I had never speculated in the first place. If I did that, I told him, then online punditry would never rise above the typical Internet rubbish that so offended him. If I was willing to speculate in public, then I was willing to publicly take the heat for speculating wrong.
That’s how I feel then and that’s how I feel now. It would be nice if Peter Gammons felt the same.